Violette Craig Innes

Admission to the gallery show is for free, but you can use this Eventbrite link to show your artist support by donating directly to them. Please CLICK HERE to show your patronage!

• Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday Noon-6pm
• Friday Noon-8pm
• Saturday Noon-6pm: Meet the Artist special event begins at 6pm
• Sunday Noon-6pm

All art is about connection: join us at Awkamon on Saturday evening for a one of a kind, multidisciplinary live art event featuring music and conversation set within Violette’s gallery show. All patronage is welcome, and Advance VIP ticket buyers will also enjoy dedicated connection time with the artist. Tickets available at Eventbrite!

Violette Craig Innes is a Toronto-based painter, musician, songwriter, producer, broadcaster and multidisciplinary artist whose creative life has always moved freely between sound, colour, landscape, performance and experimentation. Working primarily in oils and acrylics, Violette approaches painting as a rhythmic and intuitive process. Repeated marks, vivid colour, tangled lines and heavily worked surfaces give the paintings a sense of motion—as though the landscape itself were vibrating, breathing or producing music.

A central body of Violette’s landscape work has been inspired by High Park and the surrounding west-end Toronto neighbourhoods. These paintings follow the park through changing seasons and states of mind: brilliant autumn roads, dense summer trees, reflected branches, distant buildings, snow-covered paths, frozen water and the stark black-and-white geometry of winter. Rather than attempting photographic realism, Violette records the sensory and emotional experience of being in a place. Leaves become dashes of colour, trees become networks of energetic lines, and familiar scenery moves gradually toward abstraction.

Alongside these landscapes, Violette creates small experimental paintings and abstract series built from circles, loops, dots, targets and repeated gestures. These works share an underlying visual vocabulary with the landscapes. A cluster of leaves, a field of flowers, falling snow and an arrangement of painted dots can all become forms of rhythm and notation. Across both the representational and abstract work, Violette is interested in repetition, variation, improvisation and the point at which an ordinary image begins to transform into something psychological, musical or dreamlike.

Violette studied fine art at Emily Carr and has worked across painting, mixed media, digital art, sound, broadcasting architecture and live performance. As a musician, Violette has spent many years writing songs, singing, playing guitar, performing with bands and developing independent experimental work. Their musical history moves through rock, punk, improvisation, ambient sound, electronic production and DJ culture. Whether using a paintbrush, guitar, recording system or turntable, Violette’s practice is guided by the same instincts: layering, listening, responding and allowing accidents to become part of the finished work.

This exhibition is therefore not intended to be a silent or static presentation. Throughout its September 8–13, 2026 run, the gallery will also function as a living creative space. Violette will be present throughout gallery hours, welcoming visitors into an environment where painting and music coexist. The exhibition will feature informal acoustic jams with musical friends, small performances of Violette’s ambient and experimental compositions, songwriting sessions, selections from their broader musical catalogue and DJ sets unfolding at different points through the day.

These performances are not separate entertainment added to the paintings. They are another expression of the same artistic process. A repeated brush mark can act like a beat; a group of colours can behave like a chord; a landscape can hold atmosphere in much the same way as an ambient composition. Visitors may encounter a quiet gallery, a song taking shape, an improvised gathering of musicians or a drifting electronic soundscape. The exhibition will remain open to spontaneity, conversation and the possibility that something new may be created while people are there.

Bringing together large landscapes, intimate winter scenes, colourful abstractions and music drawn from across Violette’s creative life, the exhibition offers more than a retrospective collection of finished objects. It is a temporary portrait of an artist in motion—a place where different decades, disciplines, friendships and ways of seeing can meet in the same room.

Artist Statement for ‘The World Looking Back’ Show, at Awkamon CLICK HERE

A continuous artwork created to evolve over the course of this gallery show is on digital display, created by Innes as part of the ongoing exploration of their concept of ‘Ripple’.

“RIPPLE does not promise healing. It creates a space in which rest—and perhaps healing—may become possible. Its music does not tell the listener what to feel. It sends a small disturbance outward and waits to discover what the listening body will make of it.”

CLICK HERE to read the Innes’ treatise “The Myth of the Sonic Ripple” in full.